Report from Fallujah:Destroying a
Town in Order to Save it by Rahul Mahajanwww.dissidentvoice.org
April 13, 2004

Fallujah,
Iraq -- On the edge of Iraq's western desert, Fallujah is extremely arid but
has been rendered into an agricultural area by extensive irrigation. A town
of wide streets and squat, sand-colored buildings, its population is
primarily farmers.

We were in Fallujah during
the "ceasefire." This is what we saw and heard.

When the assault on
Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed. Electricity is provided by
generators and usually reserved for places with important functions. There
are four hospitals currently running in Fallujah. This includes the one
where we were, which was actually just a minor emergency clinic; another one
of them is a car repair garage. Things were very frantic at the hopsital
where we were, so we couldn't get too much translation. We depended for much
of our information on Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who
works for the humanitarian NGO Intersos, and had been pressed into service
as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors were busy, working around
the clock with minimal sleep.

A gentle, urbane man who
spoke fluent English, Al-Nazzal was beside himself with fury at the
Americans' actions (when I asked him if it was all right to use his full
name, he said, "It's ok. It's all ok now. Let the bastards do what they
want.") With the "ceasefire," large-scale bombing was rare. With a halt in
major bombing, the Americans were attacking with heavy artillery but
primarily with snipers.

Al-Nazzal told us about
ambulances being hit by snipers, women and children being shot. Describing
the horror that the siege of Fallujah had become, he said, "I have been a
fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization."

I had heard these claims at
third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It's very
difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for myself. An
ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield on the
driver's side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they would have hit
the driver's chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for
the chest). Another ambulance again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the
windshield. There's no way this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These
were deliberate shots designed to kill the drivers.

The ambulances go around
with red, blue, or green lights flashing and sirens blaring; in the
pitch-dark of blacked-out city streets there is no way they can be missed or
mistaken for something else). An ambulance that some of our compatriots were
going around in, trading on their whiteness to get the snipers to let them
through to pick up the wounded was also shot at while we were there.

During the course of the
roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen
wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the
head. She was seizing and foaming at the mouth when they brought her in;
doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal
case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with
extensive burns on his upper body and shredded thighs, with wounds that
could have been from a cluster bomb; there was no way to verify in the
madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (God is
great), and anger at the Americans.

Among the more laughable
assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small
group of isolated "extremists" repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's
population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the
mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old
boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of
fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it.
Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly
conversing with doctors and others. They conferred together about logistical
questions; not once did I see the muj threatening people with the ubiquitous
Kalashnikovs.

One of the muj was wearing
an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning others who knew im, we learned
that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi police.

One of our translators,
Rana al-Aiouby told me, "these are simple people." Although patronizing, the
statement has a strong element of truth. Agricultural tribesmen with very
strong religious beliefs, the people of Fallujah are insular and don't
easily trust strangers. We were safe because of the friends we had with us
and because we came to help them. They are much like the Pashtun of
Afghanistan -- good friends and terrible enemies.

The muj are of the people
in the same way that the stone-throwing shabab in the first Palestinian
intifada were – and the term, which means “youth,” is used for them as well.
I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the wounded we transported to
Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when asked his opinion of them, he
smiled and stuck his thumb up. Any young man who is not one of the muj today
may the next day wind his aqal around his face and pick up a Kalashnikov.

Al-Nazzal told me that the
people of Fallujah refused to resist the Americans just because Saddam told
them to; indeed, the fighting for Fallujah last year was not particularly
fierce. He said, "If Saddam said work, we would want to take off three days.
But the Americans had to cast us as Saddam supporters. When he was captured,
they said the resistance would die down, but even as it has increased, they
still call us that."

Nothing could have been
easier than gaining the good-will of the people of Fallujah had the
Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. Tribal peoples like these
have been the most easily duped by imperialists for centuries now. But now a
tipping point has been reached. To Americans, “Fallujah” may still mean four
mercenaries killed, with their corpses then mutilated and abused; to Iraqis,
“Fallujah” means the savage collective punishment for that attack, in which
over 600 Iraqis have been killed, with an estimated 200 women and over 100
children (women do not fight among the muj, so all of these are
noncombatants, as are many of the men killed).

A Special Forces colonel in
the Vietnam War said of the town, Ben Tre, “We had to destroy the town in
order to save it.” That statement encapsulated the Vietnam War. The same is
true in Iraq today -- Fallujah cannot be “saved” from its mujaheddin unless
it is destroyed.